Unzipping 2015: Comparing Boston and New York - Second Base

In the first two installments, we've looked at catcher and first base for both Boston and New York. And while the Yankees are getting slightly better projected production at both positions, it's at a much higher cost per WAR than Boston is paying.

We aren't going to have that problem here.

At second base you have a Rookie of the Year/MVP/Gold Glove winner (x4) in Boston. In New York, you have Stephen Drew.

Yeah, not much to say after that. But let's look at the lines anyway.

Boston: Dustin Pedroia

2015: 143 G | 161 H | 62 RBI | .278 BA | .340 OBP | .392 SLG | .732 OPS | 4.1 WAR | Cost per WAR: $3,048,780.49 | Age: 31

New York: Stephen Drew

2015: 100 G | 72 H | 40 RBI | .211 BA | .285 OBP | .360 SLG | .645 OPS | 0.8 WAR | Cost per WAR: $6,250,000 | Age: 32

Now, it isn't all roses and candy with Boston. This projection for Pedroia continues a year-over-year decline for Pedroia in some key stats. But his defense is still solid and that mitigates some of his decline in production. Also, his salary is very team-friendly so even if he gets worse, Boston isn't stuck with a insane Ryan Howard-esque contract that hurts the team.

But Drew's projection is abysmal. It is so bad you have to wonder why the hell Cashman signed him in the first place. The cost per WAR for the Yankees is actually higher than what Drew gets paid. Drew actually sucks an extra $1.2M of value out of the Yankees. That is how bad Stephen Drew is. There is nothing in his projection I can point to and say, "Well, at least there's this...

There's nothing. Drew is a black hole where money and talent go to die.

Actually, there is one possible silver lining. Jose Pirela, one of New York's better prospects, projects to have 1.5 WAR this year. And while that isn't great, it's almost twice what Drew is giving New York. And if Pirela is making the minimum $500,000 or so, then his cost per WAR is a ridiculous $333,333. But hey, don't worry Yankee fans. Cashman has no interest in putting Pirela at second any time soon. Because why get cheaper and better when you can pay someone millions of dollars to suck?

It's just madness. Boston would be justified paying Pedroia $5 or even $6M for each of those wins because that is the difference between the post-season and golf for a team many expect in the playoffs. But for New York, who have little if no chance of making the playoffs, there is no logical reason to pay this kind of money.

Boston comes out ahead at second both in production and cost. It's not even close.

Unzipping 2015: Comparing Boston and New York - Catchers

Whether you are a hard-core baseball fan or just aware of it during the season, you know that baseball uses analytics to a higher degree than any other sport.

PECOTA. WAR. BABIP. And many more. Some are basic and some are heavy on the math. Some are used just on a player and others can be used to project how a team will perform. But all of them try to take the statistical noise and turn it into something useful.

Today we are going to start looking at Boston and New York, position by position and their likely starters. And we will be using ZiPS to see how they stack up against one another.

ZiPS is used over at fangraphs.com. (Aside: fangraphs.com and baseball-reference.com are two incredible sites for baseball stats). Rather than trying to explain it, I will just use their explanation here:

ZiPS - The work of Dan Szymborski over at Baseball Think Factory, the ZiPS projections uses weighted averages of four years of data (three if a player is very old or very young), regresses pitchers based on DIPS theory and BABIP rates, and adjusts for aging by looking at similar players and their aging trends. It’s an effective projection system, and is displayed at FanGraphs for off-season and in-season projections.

That's pretty straight-forward. DIPS is "defense-independent pitching statistics" which measures the effectiveness of a pitcher only on statistics that don't involve other fielders. In other words, it only cares about what the pitcher has direct influence over. BABIP stands for "Batting Average on Balls In Play".

So what we hope ZiPS will do is give us a relatively accurate look at how a player will perform in the future based on their performance in the past. It's not perfect but ZiPS has been pretty reliable.

So with all that in mind, let's look at the likely starting catchers for the Red Sox and Yankees.

Boston: Christian Vazquez

2015: 115 G | 102 H | 38 RBI | .246 BA | .305 OBP | .328 SLG | .633 OPS | 1.8 WAR | Cost per WAR: $277,777 | Age: 23

New York: Brian McCann

2015: 124 G | 110 H | 74 RBI | .249 BA | .316 OBP | .431 SLG | .746 OPS | 3.1 WAR | Cost per WAR: $5,483,870 | Age: 30